Here at Nature Methods, we are very excited to be joining up with the editors of Nature Protocols and Springer Protocols, as well as the Springer Nature Experiments team, in this brand-new Springer Nature Protocols and Methods Community.

The fundamental role of an editor is to be a good communicator: selecting, improving, and disseminating interesting research to a broad community. At Nature Methods, we aim to reach a broad community of readers by publishing novel methods of wide interest and practical utility, through our journal. We also use the journal to highlight interesting developments, research trends, issues affecting the research community, and researchers themselves, through our magazine content. We are in constant contact with researchers, communicating very closely with authors and peer reviewers by email and by phone, to ensure that papers we publish are of the highest quality. We travel to conferences in order to keep up with what is exciting and new in the fields that we cover and to engage with researchers in person (you can read about some of our travels in the “On the road” channel).  

Our hope is that this forum will enable new and unique ways for us to interact with the broader research communities that we serve – which really, is just about anyone who develops or uses methods and protocols for carrying out biological research - and for the community to interact with us. We want to hear from you about what is new and interesting in research, and what your methodological and publishing needs are. We will be communicating information from the Nature Methods editorial team in the “From the editors” channel, and we will provide journalistic content in the “News” channel. If you’re looking for older posts from our now-retired Methagora blog, please see here. 

We also hope that this forum will create new ways for researchers interact with one other, bringing together methods developers with methods users. The community is open for anyone to participate in blogging, posting images or videos; if you would like to be a contributor please send an email to communities@nature.com. We will be inviting our authors to write about the story behind their research in the “Behind the paper” channel and we hope that all interested researchers will post in the “News”, “On the road” and “Journal Club” channels. We invite you to put up your feet and stay awhile!